An emotionally resonant tale of familial connections.
In Lowder’s debut historical novel, two communities struggle to find healing after a massacre in the Utah Territory in the 19th century.
In 1857, a wagon train from Arkansas heading west meets a violent end when 120 of its men, women, and children are killed. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in nearby Parowan take in the surviving 17 children, saying that Paiute Native Americans carried out the attack, but in the rest of the country, popular opinion judges LDS members to be “bigamous heathens,” and assumes that they were behind the bloodshed themselves. The eponymous “last orphan” is Tommy Dunning, née Levi Cantrell, who’s only 3 when his parents are killed; he’s immediately adopted by LDS members Bennet and Eva Dunning in Parowan. Two years later, Tommy’s memories of his birth parents are little more than nightmares, but U.S. Army soldiers come to make good on LDS leader Brigham Young’s promise to return the orphans to their extended families. It turns out that Tommy’s biological grandmother, Ruby Seddon, knew that her grandson was alive by divine vision—“My grandson Levi surely lives, as God in Heaven revealed it.” Notorious detective Allan Pinkerton takes on the task of finding answers for Ruby. Lowder effectively ramps up the tension between two women who love Tommy dearly—the only mother he knows, and the grandparent he doesn’t remember—as each woman fights for the boy and his future. Over the course of the novel, the author keeps up a quick pace, even as he juggles many different characters in locales across the country. Some of the characters’ interactions seem a bit contrived at times. However, the book has a compelling premise at its center, and the story is alive with emotional truth, as when Eva struggles to keep her family intact by keeping her son’s identity a secret, and resists her husband’s desire to take a second wife.
An emotionally resonant tale of familial connections.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73407-991-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rockhampton Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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